For professional accounting  firms, payroll services have been somewhat of a roller coaster ride over the past couple of decades, and many firms are eagerly diving back into the client service. 

Why? Because this core need of businesses of all sizes is still a great client relationship strengthener and, perhaps just as importantly, because technology has finally caught up to the needs of professional firms, making managing multiple, dozens or even 100+ client payrolls not only possible,t) but very profitable. Yes, payroll is becoming a core revenue center, with the result that many firms are taking back their client relationships from the big national service bureaus.

In our September issue, we will offer our annual review of professional payroll management systems (which will be available online and in print), with categories of payroll systems that can suit the needs of any firm, whether you prefer to let your clients do most or all of the work, or if you want your staff to cover all the bases, and variations in between.

In the meantime, let us know what your perspective is on payroll services and what you’d like your payroll programs to do better.    

We are giving away a free registration to the Bay Area full-day seminar “Taking Your Clients Online.” Go to www.cpatechadvisor.com/sleeteronline to register, and for more information on the seminar. Regular pricing for the event starts at $129 for early-bird registers, including a continental breakfast.

The seminar will be offered later in the summer in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

The program is completely free. Nominations can be made on our website at www.cpatechadvisor.com/40under40.

From the professional accountant’s perspective, having clients that use web-based programs and collaboration tools can also greatly streamline in-firm workflow processes and help the practice be more profitable. Just as the paperless movement of the past decade-plus took a little while to gain momentum and, eventually, wide-spread adoption, it has taken a few years for professionals to embrace web-based programs in their practices and for their clients.

Web-based systems such as ASP, SaaS and Web 2.0 services are the business tools of the future, and the firms who are most successful at getting their clients to the cloud, will be the ones who experience the greatest benefit from the technologies.

For those professionals looking for some guidance in getting you and your clients into web-based programs, The Sleeter Group will be offering a seminar at several cities across the country specifically geared toward helping accounting firms find the best technologies, how to implement them, security concerns, best practices, and other ways to get the most of the time saving and productivity-boosting benefits. The Sleeter Group is headed by Doug Sleeter, who writes a column for our publication. He will be joined in giving the seminars by our Executive Editor Darren Root, CPA.CITP.

Titled, “Taking Your Clients Online: How to Transform Your Client Relationships Using Cloud Computing,” the seminar will be held in the San Francisco Bay Area on July 20, followed by Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles. Pricing starts at $129 for the full-day event, which includes continental breakfast. More information on the seminars is available at www.sleeter.com/online.

Intuit’s websites were first reported down around 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, June 15. The offline websites included QuickBooks, QuickBooksOnline, Quicken, Lacerte Software, ProSeries and the main corporate website for Intuit. The websites for two recent acquisitions by Intuit, Mint.com and Intuit Online Payroll (formerly PayCycle), remained online.

As of 7:30pm CDT Wednesday, the company had not resolved the down website issues, which was resulting in problems for small businesses and professionals who rely on the web-based resources and programs. Will this pose a longer-term problem for Intuit and for web-based programs in general. Whether these website difficulties prove to be purely technical or the result of external sabotage, there may be a resulting lack of confidence in the SaaS systems.

What do you think?

Winners of the 2010 Awards are: AccountantsWorld for AccountingRelief; Thomson Reuters for its Practice CS Staff Management Module; SmartVault, Inc. for SmartVault v3; SurePayroll for Mobile Payroll; and CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business, for KnowledgeConnect. Two additional technologies were given Honorable Mention recognition: The AvaTax with AvaCert system from Avalara; and ProSystem fx Document SaaS, a part of the new SaaS Suite from from CCH.

This was the second year that The CPA Technology Advisor announced the Innovation Awards live on Twitter (#cpatechadvisor). More about the 2010 Tax & Accounting Technology Innovation Awards is available at www.cpatechadvisor.com/go/2887.

Sage Presents Annual Awards

The IRS announced on April 27 (www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=222193,00.html) that the changes are effective immediately and retroactively, allowing employers with cafeteria plans to let their employees use pre-tax contributions to pay for qualified healthcare costs for their adult children.

The new age limit is specifically written as “children who will not have reached age 27 by the end of the year…” This new age standard replaces the lower age limits applied under prior tax law and removes the requirement for dependency status.

More at the IRS:
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=222193,00.html

[And for readers who might not get the "Dog bites man" reference:
Congress changing tax law is like a dog biting a man... not really news. Now on the other hand, if man bites dog, or Congress actually left tax law alone for a year, well that would be news. ~ Isaac]

I ran into this funny, but pretty intelligent little video on YouTube about automated online backup for accounting professionals. It’s worth three minutes to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LJcAy_gfDQ

I also wrote about online professional backup systems in our April issue, which just went live today- you can read it at www.cpatechadvisor.com/go/2741.

There are surely countless reasons for these practice units not having a website, but most probably boil down to one of these:
A) I Don’t have time to build and manage a website
B) We don’t really need a website; or
C) Too much hassle.

First, all of these are lazy responses, of course. At the very least, a practice should have a basic website- which a non-web experienced person can create in about 10-15 minutes using simple tools available from many tech vendors, including most tax prep vendors, and companies like Intuit, Yahoo!, etc. The definition of such a “basic” website would be at least 4-5 pages, including your home page, an about us section, services, contact info and, perhaps, useful links. Most of the template-based website tools make this part easy. So, not really a hassle.

As far as “needing a website,” well, “need” and “should have” are two different things. Every firm can find value from a website, even at the most basic level. Most practices can also find value in offering more substantial website resources, such as financial and tax related content, enewsletters, blogs and calculators. In my June column in The CPA Technology Advisor, I will discuss some of the automated content systems that make it easy to provide useful information to clients and potential clients, as well as simple SEO strategies that help people find your website quickly when they do a search.

It’s 2010. There aren’t any excuses to not have a website anymore. And it should offer valuable content to it’s visitors, as well. While waiting on my June column, you might also want to check out this article from AccountingWeb, about blunders that accountants make on their websites.